Amy Smart Biography

Amy Smart was born in 1976 in Topanga Canyon, California. As a young girl, she gained a reputation as a tomboy and was the only girl on her Little League baseball team.

She started to model at age thirteen and moved into acting after landing a role in the 1994 MTV Rock The Vote campaign. She broke into show business with small roles in television movies before making her feature debut in the 1997 independent film, The Last Time I Committed Suicide.

smartship troopers

Smart later gained a small part in the Paul Verhoeven science fiction vehicle Starship Troopers. In How to Make the Cruelest Month, Smart played a seductress who betrays her sister. The horror film Campfire Tales followed in 1998, along with the Internet stalker thriller, Dee Snider's StrangeLand, written, produced and starring the front man of Twisted Sister.

Smart reached her widest audience, however, with a starring role opposite James Van Der Beek in the 1999 sleeper teen hit, Varsity Blues. The actress played Jules Harbor, a girl who dreams of escaping the football-obsessed culture of her town yet is linked to it as the sister of the high-school quarterback and as the sweetheart of his replacement, played by Van Der Beek.

Her portrayal of the intelligent Jules drew inevitable comparisons to Katie Holmes, co-star to Van Der Beek on the popular Dawson's Creek.

a jewel in the rough

Smart would next be featured as a supporting love interest in the touching comedy, Outside Providence, starring Alec Baldwin. Those who enjoyed her performance got to see more of her, when she was cast as Ruby, Noel's girlfriend on the WB's Felicity, from the 1999 to the 2001 season.

In 2000, Amy starred in the disappointing NBC miniseries, The '70s, before her appearance in the gross-out teen flick, Road Trip. She can now be seen on the current video hit, Rat Race, with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Whoopi Goldberg, and you can catch her next in a small role in the upcoming film, Interstate 60.

In addition to her acting career, Smart is a spokesperson for an environmental group devoted to cleaning up the Santa Monica Bay.